THEOSOPHICAL MANUALS. NO. 3.
Death - And After ?
BY
Annie Besant
THE THEOSOPHICAL
PUBLISHING HOUSE
ADYAR, MADRAS
600020, INDIA
68, Great Russell
Street, London, WClB 3BU, England
Post Box 270,
Wheaton, Illinois 60187, U.S.A.
PREFACE
This book by Dr. Annie
Besant has been through several Editions. The following is the Preface that
appeared in the First Edition.
FEW words are needed in sending this little book out into the world. It is the
third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public demand for a simple
exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have complained that our literature
is at once too abstruse, too technical, and too expensive for the ordinary
reader, and it is our hope that the present series may succeed in supplying what
is a very real want. Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all.
Perhaps among those who in these little books catch their first glimpse of its
teachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate more deeply
into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing its abstruser
problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's ardour. But these Manuals
are not written for the eager student, whom no initial difficulties can daunt;
they are [v] written for the busy men and
women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of the great truths
that render life easier to bear and death easier to face. Written by servants of
the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of our race, they can have no other
object than to serve our fellow-men. [vi]
CONTENTS
|
|
PAGE |
Views of Death |
1 |
The Immortal and the
Perishable |
9 |
The Fate of the Body |
13 |
The Fate of the
Etheric Double |
22 |
Kāmaloka,
Desire-land, and the Fate of Passions and Desires |
27 |
Kāmaloka, The Shells |
46 |
Kāmaloka, The
Elementaries |
50 |
Devachan |
52 |
The Devachanī |
67 |
The Return to Earth |
76 |
Nirvana |
79 |
Communications
between Earth and other Spheres |
81 |
Appendix – Suicides |
95 |
DEATH — AND
AFTER?
WHO does not remember the story of the Christian missionary in Britain, sitting
one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king, surrounded by his thanes, having
come thither to preach the gospel of his Master; and as he spoke of life and
death and immortality, a bird flew in through an unglazed window, circled the
hall in its flight, and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The
Christian priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the
transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the soul, in
passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the darkness of night,
but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious world. Out of the darkness,
through the open window of Birth, the life of a man comes to the earth; it
dwells for a while before our eyes; into the darkness, through the open window
of Death, it vanishes out of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion,
Whence comes it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths.
[Page 1] Today, many a
hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, there are more people in
Christendom who question whether man has a spirit to come any whence or to go
any whither than, perhaps, in the world’s history could ever before have been
found at one time. And the very Christians who claim that Death’s terrors have
been abolished, have surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more
dismal funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be more
depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded, while the dead
body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than the sweeping robes of
lusterless crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the
widow laments the “deliverance” of her husband “from the burden of the flesh”?
What more revolting than the artificially long faces of the undertaker’s men,
the drooping “weepers”, the carefully arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until
lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a great and
marked improvement has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and weepers have well-nigh
disappeared. The grotesquely ghastly hearse is almost a thing of the past, and
the coffin goes forth heaped over with flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy
black velvet pall. Men and women, though still [2]
wearing black, do not roll themselves up in shapeless garments like sable
winding-sheets, as if trying to see how miserable they could make themselves by
the imposition of artificial discomforts. Welcome common-sense has driven custom
from its throne, and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances
to natural human grief.
In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been
characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a
scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted
dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hourglass – all that could alarm and repel has
been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors. Milton, who has done so
much with his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern
Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent diction to
surround with horror the figure of Death.
The other shape,
If shape it might be called, that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
The monster moving onward came as fast,
With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode … [3]
… So spoke the grisly terror; and in shape
So speaking, and so
threatening, grew tenfold
More dreadful and deform …
… but he, my inbred enemy,
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out Death!
Hell trembled at the
hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death.*
[* Book ii., from lines 666-789. The whole passage bristles with horrors.]
That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed followers of a
Teacher said to have “brought life and immortality to light” is passing strange.
The claim, that as late in the history of the world as a mere eighteen centuries
ago the immortality of the Spirit in man was brought to light, is of course
transparently absurd, in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary
available on all hands. The stately Egyptian Ritual with its Book of the Dead,
in which are traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if
it stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim. Hear the
cry of the Soul of the righteous:
O ye, who make the escort of the God, stretch out to me your arms, for I become
one of you (xvii. 22).
Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Light, dwelling in the mighty abode, in the bosom
of the absolute darkness. I come to thee, a purified Soul; my two hands are
around thee (xxi. 1).
I open heaven; I do what was commanded in Memphis. I have knowledge of my heart;
I am in possession of my heart, I am in possession of my arms,
[4] I am in
possession of my legs, at the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned in my
body at the gates of Amenti (xxvi. 5, 6).
Not to multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly composed of
the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it suffice to give the final
judgment on the victorious Soul:
The defunct shall be deified among
the Gods in the lower divine region, he shall never be rejected. … He shall
drink from the current of the celestial river. … His Soul shall not be
imprisoned, since it is a Soul that brings salvation to those near it. The worms
shall not devour it (clxiv. 14-16).
The general belief in Reincarnation is enough to prove that the religions of
which it formed a central doctrine believed in the survival of the Soul after
Death; but one may quote as an example a passage from the Ordinances of Manu,
following on a disquisition on metempsychosis, and answering the question of
deliverance from rebirths.
Amid all these holy acts, the knowledge of self (should be translated, knowledge
of the Self, Ātmā) is said (to be) the highest; this indeed is the
foremost of all sciences, since from it immortality is obtained.* [* xii. 85. Trans.
of Burnell and Hopkins.]
The testimony of the great Zarathustrean Religion is clear, as is shown by the
following, translated from the Avesta, in which, the journey of the Soul
after [5] death
having been described, the ancient Scripture proceeds:
The soul of the pure man goes the
first step and arrives at (the Paradise) Humata; the soul of the pure man takes
the second step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hukhta; it goes the third step and
arrives at (the Paradise) Hvarst; the soul of the pure man takes the fourth step
and arrives at the Eternal Lights.
To it speaks a pure one deceased
before, asking it: How art thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshly
dwellings, from the earthly possessions, from the corporeal world hither to the
invisible, from the perishable world hither to the imperishable, as it happened
to thee – to whom hail!
Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: Ask not him whom thou asketh, (for) he is come on the
fearful, terrible, trembling way, the separation of body and soul.*
[* From the translation of Dhunjeebhoy Jamsetjee Medhora, Zoroastrian
and some other Ancient Systems, xxvii.]
The Persian Desatir
speaks with equal definiteness. This work consists of fifteen books, written by
Persian prophets, and was written originally in the Avestaic language; “God” is
Ahura-Mazda, or Yazdan:
God selected man from
animals to confer on him the soul, which is a substance free, simple,
immaterial, non-compounded and nonappetitive. And that becomes an angel by
improvement.
By his profound wisdom and most
sublime intelligence, he connected the soul with the material body.
If he (man) does good in the material body, and has a good knowledge and
religion he is Hartasp. …
As soon as he leaves this material
body, I (God) take him up to the world of angels, that he may have an interview
with the angels, and behold me.
As if he is not Hartasp, but has
wisdom and abstains from vice, I will promote him to the rank of angels.
[6]
Every person in proportion to his wisdom and piety will find a place in the rank
of wise men, among the heavens and stars. And in that region of happiness he
will remain for ever.*
[* Trans. by Mirza Mohamed Hadi, The Platonist, 306.]
In China, the immemorial custom of worshipping the Souls of ancestors shows how
completely the life of man was regarded as extending beyond the tomb. The Shū
King – placed by Mr. James Legge as the most ancient of Chinese classics,
containing historical documents ranging from B. C. 2357-627 – is full of
allusions to these Souls, who with other spiritual beings, watch over the
affairs of their descendants and the welfare of the kingdom. Thus Pan-kang,
ruling from B.C. 1401-1374, exhorts his subjects:
My object is to support and nourish you all. I think of my ancestors (who are
now) the spiritual sovereigns. … Were I to err in my government, and remain long
here, my high sovereign (the founder of our dynasty) would send down on me great
punishment for my crime, and say, “Why do you oppress my people?” If you, the
myriads of the people, do not attend to the perpetuation of your lives, and
cherish one mind with me, the One man, in my plans, the former kings will send
down on you great punishment for your crime, and say, “Why do you not agree with
our young grandson, but go on to forfeit your virtue?” When they punish you from
above, you will have no way of escape. … Your ancestors and fathers will (now)
cut you off and abandon you, and not save you from death.*
[* The Sacred Books of the East, iii. 109, 110.]
Indeed, so practical is this Chinese belief, held today as in those long-past
ages, that “the change that men call Death” [7]
seems to play a very small part in the thoughts and lives of the people
of the Flowery Land.
These quotations, which
might be multiplied a hundred-fold, may suffice to prove the folly of the idea
that immortality came to “light through the Gospel”. The whole ancient world
basked in the full sunshine of belief in the immortality of man, lived in it
daily, voiced it in its literature, went with it in calm serenity through the
gate of Death.
It remains a problem why Christianity, which vigorously and joyously re-affirmed
it, should have growing in its midst the unique terror of Death that has played
so large a part in its social life, its literature, and its art. It is not
simply the belief in hell that has surrounded the grave with horror, for other
Religions have had their hells, and yet their followers have not been harassed
by this shadowy Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light
and trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied
unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than of creed;
that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its
unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of
comfort; whereas the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever
[8] seeking to
escape from the thralldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the
disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as most conducive to unfettered
thought.
Ere passing to the consideration of the history of man in the post-mortem state,
it is necessary, however briefly, to state the constitution of man, as viewed by
the Esoteric Philosophy, for we must have in mind the constituents of his being
ere we can understand their disintegration. Man then consists of
The Immortal
Triad: the Individual. |
Ātmā, or Spirit as Will. |
Buddhi, or Spirit as Intuition. |
Manas, or Spirit as Intellect. |
The
Perishable Quaternary: the Person. |
Lower Manas,
or Mind. |
Kāma, or Desire. |
Prāna, as Energising Vitality. |
Prāna, as Automatic Vitality. |
If we consider the bodies
of man, the dense body is the visible, tangible outer form, composed of various
tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the body, composed of
the physical ethers. Prāna is vitality, the integrating energy that co-ordinates
the [9]
physical molecules
and holds them together in a definite organism; it is the life-breath within the
organism, the portion of the universal Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism
during the span of existence that we speak of as “a life”, and appears in two
forms in the dense and etheric parts of the physical body. Kāma is the aggregate
of appetites, passions, and emotions, common to man and brute, the emotions
evolving to a higher point in man under the play of the lower mind. Manas is the
Thinker in us, the Intellect. Buddhi is the aspect of the Spirit, which
manifests above the Intellect.
Now the link between the Immortal Triad and the Perishable Quaternary is
Intellect, which is dual during earth life, or incarnation, and functions as
Intellect and Mind. Intellect sends out a Ray, Mind, which works in and through
the human brain, functioning there as brain-consciousness, as the ratiocinating
intelligence. This mingles with Desire, the passional nature, the passions and
emotions thus becoming a part of Mind, as defined in Western Psychology. And so
we have the link formed between the higher and lower natures in man, this
Desire-Mind belonging to the higher by its intellectual, and to the lower by its
emotional, elements. As this forms the battleground during life,
[10] so does it
play an important part in post-mortem existence. We might now classify our seven
principles a little differently, having in view this mingling in DesireMind of
perishable and imperishable elements:
Immortal |
Will |
Intuition |
Intellect |
Conditionally Immortal
|
Desire-Mind |
Mortal
|
Desire |
Energising Vitality |
Automatic Vitality |
Some Christian writers have adopted a classification similar to this, declaring
Spirit to be inherently immortal, as being Divine; Soul to be conditionally
immortal, i.e., capable of winning immortality by uniting itself with
Spirit; Body to be inherently mortal. The majority of uninstructed Christians
chop man into two, the Body that perishes at Death, and the something – called
indifferently Soul or Spirit – that survives Death. This last classification –
if classification it may be called – is entirely inadequate, if we are to seek
any rational explanation, or even lucid statement, of the phenomena of
post-mortem existence. The tripartite view of man’s nature gives a more
reasonable representation of his [11]
constitution, but is inadequate to explain many phenomena. The septenary
division alone gives a reasonable theory consistent with the facts we have to
deal with, and therefore, though it may seem elaborate, the student will do
wisely to make himself familiar with it. If he were studying only the body, and
desired to understand its activities, he would have to classify its tissues at
far greater length and with far more minuteness than I am using here. He would
have to learn the differences between muscular, nervous, glandular, bony,
cartilaginous, epithelial, connective tissues, and all their varieties; and if
he rebelled, in his ignorance, against such an elaborate division, it would be
explained to him that only by such an analysis of the different components of
the body can the varied and complicated phenomena of life-activity be
understood. One kind of tissue is wanted for support, another for movement,
another for secretion, another for absorption, and so on; and if each kind does
not have its own distinctive name, dire confusion and misunderstanding must
result, and physical functions remain unintelligible. In the long run time is
gained, as well as clearness, by learning a few necessary technical terms, and
as clearness is above all things needed in trying to explain and to understand
very complicated [12]
post-mortem phenomena, I find myself compelled – contrary to my habit in
these elementary papers – to resort to these technical names at the outset, for
the English language has as yet no equivalents for them, and the use of long
descriptive phrases is extremely cumbersome and inconvenient.
For myself, I believe that very much of the antagonism between the adherents of
the Esoteric Philosophy and those of Spiritualism has arisen from confusion of
terms, and consequent misunderstanding of each other’s meaning. One eminent
Spiritualist lately impatiently said that he did not see the need of exact
definition, and that he meant by Spirit all the part of man’s nature that
survived Death, and was not body. One might as well insist on saying that man’s
body consists of bone and blood, and asked to define blood, answer: “Oh! I mean
everything that is not bone”. A clear definition of terms, and a rigid adherence
to them when once adopted, will at least enable us all to understand each other,
and that is the first step to any fruitful comparison of experiences.
THE FATE
OF THE BODY
The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of
reconstruction. First builded into the [13]
etheric form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the
insetting of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away
from it; with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. The outgoing
stream is scattered over the environment, and helps to rebuild bodies of all
kinds in the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms, the physical basis
of all these being one and the same.
The idea that the human tabernacle is built by countless lives, just in
the same way as the rocky crust of our Earth was, has nothing repulsive in it
for the true mystic. … Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead
organism of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various
kinds; that from without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with
every breath we draw, and from within by leucomaines, aerobes, anaerobes, and
what not. But Science never yet went so far as to assert with the Occult
Doctrine that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and stones, are
themselves altogether built up of such beings, which, except larger species, no
microscope can detect. So far as regards the purely animal and material portion
of man, Science is on its way to discoveries that will go far towards
corroborating this theory. Chemistry and physiology are the two great magicians
of the future, who are destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great
physical truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and physical
man, between the plant and man, and even between the reptile and its nest, the
rock, and man, is more and more clearly shown. The physical and chemical
constituents of all being found to be identical, chemical Science may well say
that there is no difference between the matter which composes the ox and that
which forms man. But the Occult Doctrine is far more explicit. It says: Not only
the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible
lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man
and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree which shelters him from
[14] the sun.
Each particle – whether you call it organic or inorganic – is a life.* [*
The Secret Doctrine, vol. i. p. 281. 3rd Edition.]
These “lives” which, separate and independent, are the minute vehicles of
Automatic Vitality, aggregated together form the molecules and cells of the
physical body, and they stream in and stream out, during all the years of bodily
life, thus forming a continual bridge between man and his environment.
Controlling these are the “Fiery Lives”, Energising Vitality, which constrain
these to their work of building up the cells of the body, so that they work
harmoniously and in order, subordinated to the higher manifestation of life in
the complex organism called Man. These Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in
this controlling and organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,*
[* See The Secret Doctrine, vol, i. p. 283. 3rd Edition.]
and when they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the
lower lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely
organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army; marching in
regular order under the command of a general, performing various evolutions,
keeping step, moving as a single body. At “Death” they become a disorganised and
tumultuous mob, rushing hither and [15]
thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common
object, no generally recognised authority. The body is never more alive than
when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality; alive
as a congeries, dead as an organism.
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a
mysterious force called the life-principle. To the Materialist, the only
difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force
is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the
molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them
through space. This dispersion must be Death, if it is possible to conceive such
a thing as Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense
vital energy. … Says Eliphas Levi: “Change attests movement, and movement only
reveals life. The corpse would not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules
which compose it are living and struggle to separate.”*
[* Isis Unveiled, vol. i. p. 480.]
Those who have read The Seven Principles of Man,*
[* Theosophical Manuals, No. 1.] know that the etheric
double is the vehicle of Prāna, the life-principle, or vitality. Through the
etheric double Prāna exercises the controlling and co-ordinating force spoken of
above, and “Death” takes triumphant possession of the body when the etheric
double is finally withdrawn and the delicate cord which unites it with the body
is snapped. The process of withdrawal has been watched by clairvoyants, and
definitely described. Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, “the Poughkeepsie Seer”,
[16] describes
how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and he states that the
magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six hours after apparent death.
Others have described, in similar terms, how they saw a faint violet mist rise
from the dying body, gradually condensing into a figure which was the
counterpart of the expiring person, and attached to that person by a glistening
thread. The snapping of the thread means the breaking of the last magnetic link
between the dense body and the remaining principles of the human constitution;
the body has dropped away from the man; he is excarnated, disembodied; six
principles still remain as his constitution immediately after death, the
seventh, or the dense body, being left as a cast-off garment.
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The
immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer
casings, and – as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis –
emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.
Now it is the fact that this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the
conscious entity either in the vehicle called the body of desire, the kamic or
astral body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during
earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the
[17] excarnated condition, and it may
lose for him all the terrors that encircle the unknown. He can know himself as a
conscious entity in either of these vehicles, and so prove to his own
satisfaction that “life” does not depend on his functioning through the physical
body. Why should a man who has thus repeatedly “shed” his lower bodies, and has
found the process result, not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended
freedom and vividness of life – why should he fear the final casting away of his
fetters, and the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he realises as the
prison of the flesh?
This view of human life is an essential part of the Esoteric Philosophy. Man is
primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. This living flame, passing out
from the Central Fire, weaves for itself coverings within which it dwells, and
thus becomes the Triad, the Ātma-BuddhiManas, or Spirit, the reflection of the
Immortal Self. This sends out its Ray, which becomes encased in grosser matter,
in the desire body, or kāmic elements, the passional nature, and in the etheric
double and the physical body. The once free immortal Intelligence thus
entangled, enswathed, enchained, works heavily and laboriously through the
coatings that enwrap it. In its own nature it remains ever the free Bird of
Heaven, [18]
but its wings are bound to its side by the matter into which it is plunged. When
man recognises his own inherent nature, he learns to open his prison doors
occasionally and escapes from his encircling gaol; first he learns to identify
himself with the Immortal Triad, and rises above the body and its passions into
a pure mental and moral life; then he learns that the conquered body cannot hold
him prisoner, and he unlocks its door and steps out into the sunshine of his
true life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he knows the country into
which he emerges, having trodden its ways at his own will. And at last he grows
to recognise that fact of supreme importance, that “Life” has nothing to do with
body and with this material plane; that Life is his conscious existence,
unbroken, unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which
he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence, and
a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive, because of the heavy
coverings which weigh him down. For only during these interludes (save in
exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his consciousness of continued life, being
surrounded by these coverings which delude him and blind him to the truth of
things, making that real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory.
[19] The
sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of it into the
twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration;
at Death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to
the reality. Short are the twilight periods, and long the periods of the
sunlight; but in our blinded state we call the twilight life, and to us it is
the real existence, while we call the sunlight Death, and shiver at the thought
of passing into it. Well did Giordano Bruno, one of the greatest teachers of our
Philosophy in the Middle Ages, state the truth as to the body and Man. Of the
real Man he says:
He will be present in the body in such wise that the best part of himself will
be absent from it, and will join himself by an indissoluble sacrament to divine
things, in such a way that he will not feel either love or hatred of things
mortal. Considering himself as master, and that he ought not to be servant and
slave to his body, which he would regard only as the prison which holds his
liberty in confinement, the glue which smears his wings, chains which bind fast
his hands, stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him not be
servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and blind, for the body which
he himself abandons cannot tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a
certain degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is subject to
the divinity and to nature.*
[* The Heroic Enthusiasts, trans. by L. Williams, part ii. pp. 22,
23.]
When once we thus come to regard the body, and by conquering it we gain our
liberty, Death loses for us [20]
all his terrors, and at his touch the body slips from us as a garment,
and we stand out from it erect and free.
On the same lines of
thought Dr. Franz Hartmann writes:
According to certain views of the West, man is a developed ape. According to
the views of Indian Sages, which also coincide with those of the Philosophers of
past ages and with the teachings of the Christian Mystics, man is a God, who is
united during his earthly life, through his own carnal tendencies, to an animal
(his animal nature). The God who dwells within him endows man with wisdom. The
animal endows him with force. After death, the God effects his own release
from the man by departing from the animal body. As man carries within him
this divine consciousness, it is his task to battle with his animal
inclinations, and to raise himself above them, by the help of the divine
principle, a task which the animal cannot achieve, and which therefore is not
demanded of it.*
[* Cremation, Theosophical Siftings, vol, iii.]
The “man”, using the word
in the sense of personality, as it is used in the latter half of this sentence,
is only conditionally immortal; the true man, the evolving God, releases
himself, and so much of the personality goes with him as has raised itself into
union with the divine.
The body thus left to the rioting of the countless lives – previously held in
constraint by Prāna, acting through its vehicle
the etheric double – begins to decay, that is to break up, and with the
disintegration of its cells and molecules, its particles pass away into other
combinations. [21]
On our return to Earth we may meet again some of those same countless lives that
in a previous incarnation made of our then body their passing dwelling; but all
that we are just now concerned with is the breaking up of the body whose
life-span is over, and its fate is complete disintegration. To the dense body,
then, Death means dissolution as an organism, the loosing of the bonds that
united the many into one.
THE FATE OF THE ETHERIC
DOUBLE
The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the gross body of man. It is
the double that is sometimes seen during life in the neighbourhood of the body,
and its absence from the body is generally marked by the heaviness or
semi-lethargy of the latter. Acting as the reservoir, or vehicle, of the
life-principle during earth-life, its withdrawal from the body is naturally
marked by the lowering of all vital functions, even while the cord which unites
the two is still unbroken. As has been already said, the snapping of the cord
means the death of the body.
When the etheric double finally quits the body, it does not travel to any
distance from it. Normally it remains floating over the body, the state of
consciousness [22]
being dreamy and peaceful, unless tumultuous distress and violent emotion
surround the corpse from which it has just issued. And here it may be well to
say that during the slow process of dying, while the etheric double is
withdrawing from the body, taking with it the higher principles, as after it has
withdrawn, extreme quiet and self-control should be observed in the chamber of
Death. For during this time the whole life passes swiftly in review before the
Ego, the individual, as those have related who have passed in drowning into this
unconscious and pulseless state. A Master has written:
At the last moment the whole life is reflected in our memory, and emerges
from all the forgotten nooks and corners, picture after, picture, one, event
after another. … The man may often appear dead, yet from the last
pulsation, from and between the last throbbing of his heart and the moment when
the last spark of animal heat leaves the body, the brain thinks, and the Ego
lives over in those few brief seconds his whole life. Speak in whispers, ye who
assist at a deathbed, and find yourselves in the solemn presence of death.
Especially have ye to keep quiet just after death has laid her clammy hand upon
the body. Speak in whispers, I say, lest ye disturb the quiet ripple of
[23]
thought, and hinder the busy work of the past, casting its reflection upon the
veil of the future.* [* Man:
Fragments of Forgotten History, by Two Chelâs
(Mohini Chatterji & Laura C. Holloway),
pp. 119, 120.]
This is the time during
which the thought-images of the ended earth-life, clustering around their maker,
group and interweave themselves into the completed image of that life, and are
impressed in their totality on the Astral Light. The dominant tendencies, the
strongest thought-habits, assert their pre-eminence, and stamp themselves as the
characteristics which will appear as “innate qualities” in the succeeding
incarnation. This balancing-up of the life-issues, this reading of the karmic
records, is too solemn and momentous a thing to be disturbed by the ill-timed
wailings of personal relatives and friends.
At the solemn moment of death every man, even when death is sudden, sees the
whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details. For one
short instant the personal become one with the individual and
all-knowing Ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of
causes which have been at work during his life. He sees and now understands
himself as he is, unadorned by flattery or self-deception. He reads his life,
remaining as a spectator, looking down into the arena he is quitting.*
[* Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky, p. 109. Third Edition.]
This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by the dreamy, peaceful
semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric double floats above the body
to which it has belonged, now completely separated from it.
[24]
Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or in the neighbourhood,
when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned to someone left behind,
when some anxiety has been in the mind at the last, something left undone which
needed doing, or when some local disturbance has shaken the tranquillity of the
passing entity. Under these conditions, or others of a similar nature, the
double may be seen or heard; when seen, it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness
alluded to, is silent, vague in its aspect, unresponsive.
As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually disengage themselves
from the etheric double, and shake this off as they previously shook off the
grosser body. They pass on, as a fivefold entity, into a state to be next
studied, leaving the etheric double, with the dense body of which it is the
counterpart, thus becoming an ethereal corpse, as much as the body had become a
dense corpse. This ethereal corpse remains near the dense one, and they
disintegrate together; clairvoyants see these ethereal wraiths in churchyards,
sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body, sometimes as violet mists or
lights. Such an ethereal corpse has been seen by a friend of my own, passing
through the horribly repulsive stages of decomposition, a ghastly
[25] vision in
face of which clairvoyance was certainly no blessing. The process goes on
pari passu, until all but the actual bony skeleton of the dense body is
completely disintegrated, and the particles have gone to form other
combinations.
One of the great advantages of cremation – apart from all sanitary conditions –
lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the physical elements
composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought about by the burning. Instead
of slow and gradual decomposition, swift dissociation takes place, and no
physical remnants are left, working possible mischief.
The ethereal corpse may to some extent be revivified for a short period after
its death. Dr. Hartmann says:
The fresh corpse of a person who has suddenly been killed may be galvanised into
a semblance of life by the application of a galvanic battery. Likewise the
astral corpse of a person may be brought back into an artificial life by being
infused with a part of the life principle of the medium. If that corpse is one
of a very intellectual person, it may talk very intellectually; and if it was
that of a fool, it will talk like a fool.* [*
Magic, White and Black, Dr. Franz Hartmann, pp. 109, 110. Third Edition.]
This mischievous procedure
can only be carried out in the neighbourhood of the corpse, and for a very
limited time after death, but there are cases on record of such galvanising of
the ethereal corpse, performed
[26]
at the grave of the
departed person. Needless to say that such a process belongs distinctly to
“Black” Magic, and is wholly evil. Ethereal corpses, like dense ones, if not
swiftly destroyed by burning, should be left in the silence and the darkness, a
silence and a darkness that it is the worst profanity to break.
KĀMALOKA, DESIRE-LAND,
AND THE FATE OF PASSIONS AND DESIRES
Loka is a Samskrit word that may be translated as place, world, land, so that
Kāmaloka is literally the place or the world of Desire, Kāma being the name of
that part of the human organism that includes all the passions, desires, and
emotions which man has in common with the lower animals.*
[* See The Seven Principles of Man, pp. 17-21.] In
this division of the universe, the Kāmaloka, dwell all the human entities that
have shaken off the dense body and its ethereal double, but have not yet
disentangled themselves from the passional and emotional nature. Kāmaloka has
many other tenants, but we are concerned only with the human beings who have
lately passed through the gateway of Death, and it is on these that we must
concentrate our study. [27]
A momentary digression may be pardoned on the question of the existence of
regions in the universe, other than the physical, peopled with intelligent
beings. The existence of such regions is postulated by the Esoteric Philosophy,
and is known to the Adepts and to very many less highly evolved men and women by
personal experience; all that is needed for the study of these regions is the
evolution of the faculties latent in every man; a “living” man, in ordinary
parlance, can leave his dense and ethereal bodies behind him, and explore these
regions without going through Death’s gateway. Thus we read in the
Theosophist that real knowledge may be acquired by the Spirit in the living
man coming into conscious relations with the world of Spirit.
As in the case, say, of an initiated Adept, who brings back upon earth with him
the clear and distinct recollection – correct to a detail – of facts gathered,
and the information obtained, in the invisible sphere of Realities.*
[* Theosophist, March 1882, p. 158, note.]
In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge as definite, as
certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa in ordinary fashion,
explore its deserts, and return to his own land the richer for the knowledge and
experience gained. A seasoned African explorer would care but little for the
criticisms passed [28]
on his report by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what
he saw, describe the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country he
had traversed, sum up its products and its characteristics. If he was
contradicted, laughed at, set right, by untravelled critics, he would be neither
ruffled nor distressed, but would merely leave them alone. Ignorance cannot
convince knowledge by repeated asseveration of its nescience. The opinion of a
hundred persons on a subject on which they are wholly ignorant is of no more
weight than the opinion of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many
consenting witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing
multiplied a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it be if all
the Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of earth the
only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself. As Dr. Huxley said:
Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people
the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something
practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.*
[* Essays upon some Controverted Questions, p. 36.]
If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own, if their senses
responded to vibrations different from those which affect ours, they and we
might walk [29]
side by side, pass each other, meet each other, pass through each other, and yet
be never the wiser as to each other’s existence. Mr. Crookes gives us a glimpse
of the possibility of such unconscious coexistence of intelligent beings, and
but a very slight effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.
It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do
not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are
able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would
practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance,
what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not
sensitive to the ordinary rays of light, but sensitive to the vibrations
concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among
the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a
telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled
through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a
conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of medieval
mystics, and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or
consumption of fuel.*
[* Fortnightly Review, 1892, p. 176.]
Kāmaloka is a region peopled by intelligent and semi-intelligent entities, just
as our own is thus peopled it is crowded, like our world, with many types and
forms of living things, as diverse from each other as a blade of grass is
different from a tiger, a tiger from a man. It interpenetrates our own
world and is interpenetrated by it, but, as the
states of matter in the two worlds differ, they co-exist without the knowledge
of the [30]
intelligent beings in either. Only under abnormal circumstances can
consciousness of each other’s presence arise among the inhabitants of the two
worlds; by certain peculiar training a living human being can come into
conscious contact with and control many of the sub-human denizens of Kāmaloka;
human beings, who have quitted earth and in whom the kāmic elements were strong,
may very readily be attracted by the kāmic elements in embodied men, and by
their help become conscious again of the presence of the scenes they had left;
and human beings still embodied may set up methods of communication with the
disembodied, and may, as said, leave their own bodies for awhile, and become
conscious in Kāmaloka by the use of faculties through which they have accustomed
their consciousness to act. The point which is here to be clearly grasped is the
existence of Kāmaloka as a definite region, inhabited by a large diversity of
entities, among whom are disembodied human beings.
From this necessary digression we return to the particular human being whose
fate, as a type, we may be said to be tracing, and of whose dense body and
etheric double we have already disposed. Let us contemplate him in the state of
very brief duration that follows the shaking off of these two casings.
[31] Says H.
P. Blavatsky, after quoting from Plutarch a description of the man after death:
Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a septenary during life; a
quintile just after death, in Kāmaloka.* [* Key to
Theosophy, p. 67.]
Prāna, the portion of the life-energy appropriated by the man in his embodied
state, having lost its vehicle, the ethereal double, which, with the physical
body, has slipped away from its controlling energy, must pass back into the
great life-reservoir of the universe. As water enclosed in a glass vessel and
plunged into a tank mingles with the surrounding water if the vessel be broken,
so Prāna, as the bodies drop from it, mingles again with the Life Universal. It
is only “just after death” that man is a quintile, or fivefold in his
constitution, for Prāna, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain
appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.
The man now is clothed, but with the Kāma Rūpa, or body of Kāma, the desire
body, a body of astral matter, often termed “fluidic”, so easily does it, during
earth-life, take any form impressed upon it from without or moulded from within.
The living man is there, the immortal Triad, still clad in the last of its
terrestrial garments, in the subtle, sensitive, responsive forms
[32] which lent
it during embodiment the power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, to
think, in the physical world.
When the man dies, his three lower principles leave him forever; i.e.,
body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the etheric body, or the double of
the living man. And then his four principles – the central or middle principle
(the animal soul or Kāma Rūpa, with what it has assimilated from the lower Manas)
and the higher Triad – find themselves in Kāmaloka.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 97.]
This desire body undergoes
a marked change soon after death. The different densities of the astral matter
of which it is composed arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes,
the densest being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very
limited contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself, if left
undisturbed, and prepares itself for the next step onwards, while the desire
body gradually disintegrates, shell after shell.
Up to the point of this re-arrangement of the matter of the desire body, the
post-mortem experience of all is much the same; it is a “dreamy, peaceful
semi-consciousness”, as before said, and this, in the happiest cases, passes
without vivid awakening into the deeper “pre-devachanic unconsciousness” which
ends with the blissful wakening in Devachan, heaven, for the period of
[33] repose
that intervenes between two incarnations. But as, at this point, different
possibilities arise, let us trace a normal uninterrupted progression in Kāmaloka,
up to the threshold of Devachan, and then we can return to consider other
classes of circumstances.
If a person has led a pure life, and has steadfastly striven to rise and to
identify himself with the higher rather than the lower part of his nature, after
shaking off the dense body and the etheric double, and after Prāna has
re-mingled with the ocean of Life, and he is clothed only with the Kāma Rūpa,
the passional elements in him, being but weak and accustomed to comparatively
little activity, will not be able to assert themselves strongly in Kāmaloka. Now
during earth-life Kāma and the Lower Manas are strongly united and interwoven
with each other; in the case we are considering Kāma is weak, and the Lower
Manas has purified Kāma to a great extent. The mind, woven with the passions,
emotions, and desires, has purified them, and has assimilated their pure part,
absorbed it into itself, so that all that is left of Kāma is a mere residue,
easily to be gotten rid of, from which the Immortal Triad can readily free
itself. Slowly this Immortal Triad, the true Man, draws in all his forces; he
draws into himself the memories of the earth-life just ended,
[34] its loves,
its hopes, its aspirations, and prepares to pass out of Kāmaloka into the
blissful rest of Devachan, the “abode of the Gods”, or, as some say, “the land
of bliss”. Kāmaloka
is an astral locality, the Limbus of scholastic theology, the Hades of the
ancients, and, strictly speaking, a locality only in a relative sense. It
has neither a definite area, nor boundary, but exists within subjective
space, i.e., is beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it
is there that the astral eidolons of all the beings that have lived,
animals included, await their second death. For the animals it comes with
the disintegration and the entire fading out of their astral particles to the
last. For the human eidolon it begins when the Ātma-Buddhi-Mānasic Triad
is said to “separate” itself from its lower principles or the reflection of the
ex-personality, by falling into the devachanic state.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 97.]
This second death is the
passage, then, of the Immortal Triad from the kāmalokic sphere, so closely
related to the earth sphere, into the higher state of Devachan, of which we must
speak later. The type of man we are considering passes through this, in the
peaceful dreamy state already described, and, if left undisturbed, will not
regain full consciousness until these stages are passed through, and peace gives
way to bliss.
But during the whole period that the five principles – the Immortal Triad, Mind
and Desire – remain in Kāmaloka, whether the period be long or short, days or
centuries, they are within the reach of the [35]
earth-influences. In the case of such a person as we have been
describing, an awakening may be caused by the passionate sorrow and desires of
friends left on earth, and these violently vibrating kamic elements in the
embodied persons may set up vibrations in the desire body of the disembodied,
and so reach and rouse the lower Mind, not yet withdrawn to and reunited with
its parent, the Spiritual Intellect. Thus it may be roused from its dreamy state
to vivid remembrance of the earth-life so lately left, and may – if any
sensitive or medium is concerned, either directly, or indirectly through one of
these grieving friends in communication with the medium – use the medium’s
etheric and dense bodies to speak or write to those left behind. This awakening
is often accompanied with acute suffering, and even if this be avoided, the
natural process of the Triad freeing itself is rudely disturbed, and the
completion of its freedom is delayed. In speaking of this possibility of
communication during the period immediately succeeding death and before the
freed Man passes on into Devachan, H. P. Blavatsky says:
Whether any living mortal, save a few exceptional cases – when the intensity of
the desire in the dying person to return for some purpose forced the higher
consciousness to remain awake, and, therefore, it was really the
individuality, the “Spirit”, that communicated – has derived much benefit
from the return of the Spirit into the objective plane is another
question. The Spirit is [36]
dazed after death, and falls very soon into what we call “pre-devachanic
unconsciousness”.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 102.]
Intense desire may move
the disembodied entity to spontaneously return to the sorrowing ones left
behind, but this spontaneous return is rare in the case of persons of the type
we are just now considering. If they are left at peace, they will generally
sleep themselves quietly into Devachan, and so avoid any struggle or suffering
in connection with the second death. On the final escape of the Immortal Triad
there is left behind in Kāmaloka only the desire body, the “shell” or mere empty
phantom, which gradually disintegrates; but it will be better to deal with this
in considering the next type, the average man or woman, without marked
spirituality of an elevated kind, but also without marked evil tendencies.
When an average man or woman reaches Kāmaloka, the spiritual Intelligence is
clothed with a desire body, which possesses considerable vigour and vitality;
the lower Manas, closely interwoven with Kāma during the earth-life just ended,
having lived much in the enjoyment of objects of sense and in the pleasure of
the emotions, cannot quickly disentangle itself from the web of its weaving, and
return to its Parent Mind, the source [37]
of its own being. Hence a considerable delay in the world of transition,
in Kāmaloka, while the desires wear out and fade away to a point at which they
can no longer detain the Soul with their clinging arms.
As said, during the period that the Immortal Triad, Mind and Desire remain
together in Kāmaloka, communication between the disembodied entity and the
embodied entities on earth is possible. Such communication will generally be
welcomed by these, disembodied ones, because their desires and emotions still
cling to the earth they have left, and the mind has not sufficiently lived on
its own plane to find therein full satisfaction and contentment. The lower Manas
still yearns towards kāmic gratifications and the vivid highly coloured
sensations of earth-life, and can by these yearnings be drawn back to the scenes
it has regretfully quitted. Speaking of the possibility of communication between
the Ego of the deceased person and a medium, H. P. Blavatsky says in the
Theosophist,*
[* June 1882, art, “Seeming Discrepancies”.] as from the
teachings received by her from the Adept Brothers, that such communication may
occur during two intervals:
Interval the first is that
period between the physical death and the merging of the spiritual Ego into that
state which is known in the Arhat esoteric doctrine as Bardo. We have translated
this as the “gestation” period [pre-devachanic].
[38]
Some of the communications made through mediums are from this source, from the
disembodied entity, thus drawn back to the earth-sphere – a cruel kindness,
delaying its forward evolution and introducing an element of disharmony into
what should be an orderly progression. The period in Kāmaloka is thus
lengthened, the desire body is fed and its hold on the Ego is maintained, and
thus is the freedom of the Soul deferred, the immortal Swallow being still held
down by the bird-lime of earth.
Persons who have led an evil life, who have gratified and stimulated their
animal passions, and have full fed the desire body while they have starved even
the lower mind – these remain for long, denizens of Kāmaloka, and are filled
with yearnings for the earth-life they have left, and for the animal delights
that they can no longer – in the absence of the physical body – directly taste.
These gather round the medium and the sensitive, endeavouring to utilise them
for their own gratification, and these are among the more dangerous of the
forces so rashly confronted in their ignorance by the thoughtless and the
curious.
Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose lives on earth have
been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act of others, or by accident.
[39] Their fate
in Kāmaloka depends on the conditions which surrounded their out-goings from
earthly life, for not all suicides are guilty of felo de se, and the
measure of responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of
such has been thus described:
Suicides, although not wholly dissevered from their sixth and seventh
principles, and quite potent in the seance room, nevertheless, to the day when
they would have died a natural death, are separated from their higher principles
by a gulf. The sixth and seventh principles remain passive and negative, whereas
in cases of accidental death the higher and the lower groups actually
attract each other. In cases of good and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter
gravitates irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus either slumbers
surrounded by happy dreams, or sleeps a dreamless profound sleep until the hour
strikes. With a little reflection and an eye to the eternal justice and fitness
of things, you will see why. The victim, whether good or bad, is irresponsible
for his death. Even if his death were due to some action in a previous life or
an antecedent birth, was an act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still it
was not the direct result of an act deliberately committed by the
personal Ego of that life during which he happened to be killed. Had he been
allowed to live longer he might have atoned for his antecedent
[40] sins
still more effectually, and even now, the Ego having been made to pay off the
debt of his maker, the personal Ego is free from the blows of retributive
justice. The Dhyan Chohans, who have no hand in the guidance of the living human
Ego, protect the helpless victim when it is violently thrust out of its element
into a new one, before it is matured and made fit and ready for it.
These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate with those in
earth-life, but much to their own injury. As said above, the good and innocent
sleep happily till the life-period is over. But where the victim of an accident
is depraved and gross, his fate is a sad one.
Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about (not shells, for
their connection with their two higher principles is not quite broken) until
their deathhour comes. Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions
which bind them to familiar scenes, they are enticed by the opportunities which
mediums afford to gratify them vicariously. They are the Pishachas, the Incubi
and Succubae of mediaeval times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust, and
avarice – Elementaries of intensified craft, wickedness, and cruelty; provoking
their victims to horrid crimes, and revelling in their commission They not only
ruin their victims, but these psychic vampires, borne along by the torrent of
their hellish impulses, at last – at the [41]
fixed close to their natural period of life – they are carried out of
the earth’s aura into regions where for ages they endure exquisite suffering and
end with entire destruction.
* * * * * * *
* * * *
Now the causes producing the “new being” and determining the nature of Karma
are Trishnā (Tanha) – thirst, desire for sentient existence – and Upādāna, which
is the realisation or consummation of Trishna, or that desire. And both of these
the medium helps to develop ne plus ultra in an Elementary, be he a
suicide or a victim. The rule is that a person who dies a natural death will
remain from “a few hours to several short years” within the earth’s attraction –
i. e., the Kāmaloka. But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those who die
a violent death in general. Hence, one of such Egos who was destined to lave,
say, eighty or ninety years – but who either killed himself or was killed by
some accident, let us suppose at the age of twenty – would have to pass in the
Kāmaloka not “a few years”, but in this case sixty or seventy years, as an
Elementary, or rather an “earth-walker”, since he is not, unfortunately for him,
even a “Shell”. Happy, thrice happy, in comparison, are those disembodied
entities who sleep their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom of Space!
And woe to those whose Trishnā will attract them to mediums, and woe to the
latter who tempt them with such an easy Upādāna. For, in grasping them
[42] and
satisfying their thirst for life, the medium helps to develop in them – is, in
fact, the cause of – a new set of Skandhas, a new body with far worse tendencies
and passions than the one they lost. All the future of this new body will be
determined thus, not only by the Karma of demerit of the previous set or group,
but also by that of the new set of the future being. Were the mediums and
spiritualists but to know, as I said, that with every new “angel guide” they
welcome with rapture, they entice the latter into a Upādāna, which will be
productive of untold evils for the new Ego that will be reborn under its
nefarious shadow, and that with every seance, especially for materialisation,
they multiply the causes for misery, causes that will make the unfortunate Ego
fail in his spiritual birth, or be reborn into a far worse existence than ever –
they would, perhaps, be less lavish in their hospitality.
Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by voluntary
sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in Kāmaloka, but the
state of the disembodied entity will depend on the motive that cut short the
life.
There are very few, if any, of the men who indulge in these vices, who feel
perfectly sure that such a course of action will lead them eventually to
premature death. Such is the penalty of Māyā. The “vices” will not escape their
punishment; but it is the cause, not the effect, that will be punished,
[43]
especially an unforeseen, though probable effect. As well call a man a “suicide”
who meets his death in a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with
“over-study”. Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain work to produce
a softening of the brain matter, which may carry him away. In such a case no one
ought to cross the Kālapāni, nor even to take a bath for fear of getting
faint in it and drowned (for we all know of such cases), nor should a man do his
duty, least of all sacrifice himself for even a laudable and highly beneficial
cause as many of us do. Motive is everything, and man is punished in a case of
direct responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim’s case the natural hour of
death was anticipated accidentally, while in that of the suicide death is
brought on voluntarily and with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate
consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of temporary insanity is
not a felo de se, to the great grief and often trouble of the Life
Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kāmaloka,
but falls asleep like any other victim.
The population of Kāmaloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly dangerous element
by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal, which wrench the physical body
from the soul and send the latter into Kāmaloka clad in the desire body,
throbbing with pulses of hatred, [44]
passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with un-satiated
lusts. A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of society, but a
murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far more dangerous entity; society
may protect itself against the first, but in its present state of ignorance it
is defenceless as against the second.
Finally, the Immortal
Triad sets itself free from the desire body, and passes out of Kāmaloka; the
higher Manas draws back its Ray, coloured with the life-scenes it has passed
through, and carrying with it the experiences gained through the personality it
has informed. The labourer is called in from the field, and he returns home
bearing his sheaves with him, rich or poor, according to the fruitage of the
life. When the Triad with the Ray has quitted Kāmaloka, it passes wholly out of
the sphere of earth attractions:
As soon as it has stepped outside the
Kāmaloka – crossed the “Golden Bridge” leading to the “Seven Golden Mountains” –
the Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums.
There are some exceptional possibilities of reaching such an Ego, that will be
explained later, but the Ego is out of the reach of the ordinary medium and
cannot be recalled into the earth-sphere. But ere we follow
[45] the
further course of the Triad, we must consider the fate of the now deserted
desire body, left as a mere reliquum in Kāmaloka.
KĀMALOKA. THE SHELLS.
The Shell is the desire body, emptied of the Triad and the Ray, which have now
passed onwards; it is the third of the transitory garments of Soul, cast aside
and left in Kāmaloka to disintegrate.
When the past earth-life has been noble, or even when it has been of average
purity and utility, this Shell retains but little vitality after the passing
onwards of the Triad, and rapidly dissolves. Its molecules, however, retain,
during this process of disintegration, the impressions made upon them during the
earth-life, the tendency to vibrate in response to stimuli constantly
experienced during that period. Every student of physiology is familiar with
what is termed automatic action, with the tendency of cells to repeat vibrations
originally set up by purposive action; thus are formed what we term habits, and
we unconsciously repeat motions which at first were done with thought. So strong
is this automatism of the body, that, as everyone knows by experience, it is
difficult to break off the use of a phrase or of a gesture that has become
“habitual”. [46]
Now the desire body is during earth-life the recipient of and the respondent to
all stimuli from without, and it also continually receives and responds to
stimuli from the lower Manas. In it are set up habits, tendencies to repeat
automatically familiar vibrations, vibrations of love and desire, vibrations
imaging past experiences of all kinds. Just as the hand may repeat a familiar
gesture, so may the desire body repeat a familiar feeling or thought. And when
the Triad has left it, this automatism remains, and the Shell may thus simulate
feelings and thoughts which are empty of all true intelligence and will. Many of
the responses to eager enquiries at séances come from such Shells, drawn
to the neighbourhood of friends and relatives by the magnetic attractions so
long familiar and dear, and automatically responding to the waves of emotion and
remembrance, to the impulse of which they had so often answered during the
lately closed earth-life. Phrases of affection, moral platitudes, memories of
past events, will be all the communications such Shells can make, but these may
be literally poured out under favourable conditions under the magnetic stimuli
freely applied by the embodied friends and relatives.
In cases where the lower Manas during earth-life has been strongly attached to
material objects and to [47]
intellectual pursuits directed by a self-seeking motive, the desire body
nay have acquired a very considerable automatism of an intellectual character,
and may give forth responses of considerable intellectual merit. But still the
mark of non-originality will be present: the apparent intellectuality will only
give out reproductions, and there will be no sign of the new and independent
thought which would be the inevitable outcome of a strong intelligence working
with originality amid new surroundings. Intellectual sterility brands the great
majority of communications from the “spirit world”; reflections of earthly
scenes, earthly conditions, earthly arrangements, are plentiful, but we usually
seek in vain for strong, new thought, worthy of Intelligences freed from the
prison of the flesh. The communications of a loftier kind occasionally granted
are, for the most part, from non-human Intelligences, attracted by the pure
atmosphere of the medium or sitters.
And there is an ever-present danger in this commerce with the Shells. Just
because they are Shells, and nothing more, they answer to the impulses that
strike on them from without, and easily become malicious and mischievous,
automatically responding to evil vibrations. Thus a medium, or sitters of poor
moral character, will impress the Shells that flock around them
[48] with
impulses of a low order, and any animal desires, petty and foolish thoughts,
will set up similar vibrations in the blindly responsive Shells.
Again, the Shell is very easily taken possession of by Elementals, the
semi-conscious forces working in the kingdoms of Nature, and may be used by them
as a convenient vehicle for many a prank and trick. The etheric double of the
medium, and the desire bodies emptied of their immortal Tenants, give the
material basis by which Elementals can work many a curious and startling result;
and frequenters of seances may be confidently appealed to, and asked
whether many of the childish freaks with which they are familiar – pullings of
hair, pinchings, slaps, throwing about of objects, piling up of furniture,
playing on accordions, etc. – are not more rationally accounted for as the
tricky vagaries of subhuman forces, than as the actions of “spirits” who, while
in the body, were certainly incapable of such vulgarities.
Let us leave the Shells alone to peacefully dissolve into their elements, and
mingle once again in the crucible of Nature. The authors of The
Perfect Way put very well the real character of the Shell:
The true “ghost” consists of the exterior and earthly portion of the Soul, that
portion which, being weighted with cares, [49]
attachments, and memories merely mundane, is detached by the Soul and
remains in the astral sphere, an existence more or less definite and personal,
and capable of holding, through a sensitive, converse with the living. It is,
however, but as a cast-off vestment of the Soul, and is incapable of endurance
as ghost. The true Soul and real person, the anima divina, parts
at death with all those lower affections which would have retained it near its
earthly haunts.*
[* Anna Bonus Kingsford and Edward Maitland, Pp. 73, 74. Ed. 1887.]
If we would find our
beloved, it is not among the decaying remnants in Kāmaloka that we should seek
them. “Why seek ye the living among the dead?”
KĀMALOKA. THE
ELEMENTARIES.
The word “Elementary” has been so loosely used that it has given rise to a good
deal of confusion. It is thus defined by H. P. Blavatsky:
Properly, the disembodied souls of the depraved; these souls having, at
some time prior to death, separated from themselves their divine spirits, and so
lost their chance for immortality. But at the present stage of learning it has
been thought best to apply the term to the spooks or phantoms of disembodied
persons, in general to those whose temporary habitation is the Kāmaloka. … Once
divorced from their higher Triads and their bodies, these souls remain in their
Kāma Rūpic envelopes, and are irresistibly drawn to the earth amid elements
congenial to their gross natures. Their stay in the Kāmaloka varies as to its
duration; but ends invariably in disintegration, dissolving like a column of
mist, atom by atom, in the surrounding elements.*
[* Theosophical Glossary,
Elementaries. 1892. Posthumous publication edited by G. R. S. Mead.]
[50]
Students of this series of Manuals know that it is possible for the lower Manas
to so entangle itself with Kāma as to wrench itself away from its source, and
this is spoken of in Occultism as “the loss of the Soul”.*
[* See The Seven Principles of Man, pp. 44-46.]
It is, in other words, the loss of the personal self, which has separated
itself from its Parent, the Higher Ego, and has thus doomed itself to perish.
Such a Soul, having thus separated itself from the Immortal Triad during its
earth-life, becomes a true Elementary, after it has quitted the dense and
etheric bodies. Then, clad in its desire body, it lives for awhile, for a longer
or shorter time according to the vigour of its vitality, a wholly evil thing,
dangerous and malignant, seeking to renew its fading vitality by any means laid
open to it by the folly or ignorance of still embodied souls. Its ultimate fate
is, indeed, destruction, but it may work much evil on its way to its self-chosen
doom.
The word Elementary is, however, very often used to describe the lower Manas in
its garment the desire body, not broken away from the higher Principles, but not
yet absorbed into its Parent, the higher Manas. Such Elementaries may be in any
stage of progress, harmless or mischievous. [51]
Some writers, again, use Elementary as a synonym for Shell, and so cause
increased confusion. The word should at least be restricted to the desire body
plus lower Manas, whether the lower Manas be disentangling itself from
the kamic elements, in order that it may be re-absorbed into its source, or
separated from the Higher Ego, and therefore on the road to destruction.
DEVACHAN
Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy, there are
few, perhaps, which the Western mind has found more difficulty in grasping than
that of Devachan, or Devasthān, the Devaland, or land of the Gods.* [*
The name Sukhāvatī, borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism, is sometimes used instead of
that of Devachan. Sukhavati, according to Schlagintweit, is “the abode of the
blessed, into which ascend those who have accumulated much merit by the practice
of virtues” and “involves the deliverance from metempsychosis” (Buddhism in
Tibet, p. 99). According to the Prasanga school, the higher Path leads to
Nirvāna, the lower to Sukhāvatī. But Eitel calls Sukhāvatī the “Nirvana of the
common people, where the saints revel in physical bliss for aeons, until they
reenter the circle of transmigration” (‘Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary’). Eitel,
however, under “Amitābha” states that the “popular mind” regards the “paradise
of the West” as “the haven of final redemption from the eddies of
transmigration”. When used by one of the Teachers of the Esoteric Philosophy it
covers the higher Devachanic states, but from all of these the Soul comes back
to earth.] And one of the chief difficulties
[52] has arisen
from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and other similar terms,
as denoting the devachanic consciousness – a general sense of unreality having
thus come to pervade the whole conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker
speaks of the present earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the solid Western
at once puts down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less
illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of beefsteaks and
bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a state beyond Death – a
state which to him is misty and unreal in his own religion, and which, as he
sadly feels, is lacking in all the substantial comforts dear to the family man –
then he accepts the words in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks
of Devachan as a delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well,
therefore, on the threshold of Devachan to put this question of “illusion” in
its true light.
In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena
are literally “appearances”, the outer masks in which the One Reality shows
itself forth in our changing universe. The more “material” and solid the
appearance, the further it is from Reality, and therefore the more illusory it
is. What can be a greater fraud than our body, so apparently solid, stable,
[53] visible
and tangible? It is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles,
an attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny invisibles,
that becomes visible by their aggregation at this centre, and then stream away
again, becoming invisible by reason of their minuteness as they separate off
from this aggregation. In comparison with this ever-shifting but apparently
stable body how much less illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the
pretensions of the body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly
imposed on by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt
to regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is the
nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as they take on
more and more of a phenomenal character.
Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical world. For
the “mind” is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in us, the true and
conscious Entity, the inner Man, “that was, that is, and will be, for whom the
our shall never strike”. The less deeply this inner Man is plunged into matter,
the less unreal is his life; and when he has shaken off the garments he donned
at incarnation, his physical, ethereal, and passional bodies, then he is nearer
to the Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of
[54] illusion
still dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when round
him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less illusory life is
that which is without the body, and the disembodied is, comparatively speaking,
his normal state. Out of this normal state he plunges into physical life for
brief periods in order that he may gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and
bring them back to enrich his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into
the depths of the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths
of the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not stay there
long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his own atmosphere and
shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves. And therefore it is truly
said of the Soul that has escaped from earth that it has returned to its own
place, for its home is the “land of the Gods”, and here on earth it is an exile
and a prisoner. This view was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a
conversation reported by H. P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title “Life and
Death”.*
[* See Lucifer, Oct. 1892, vol. xi. No. 62.] The
following extracts state the case:
The Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the
terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the
[55] latter as an undoubted
actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness,
it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres
must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless,
never-changing immortal I, the Sūtrātmā. Whereas in every new incarnation it
clothes itself in a perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived
one …. The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit, force, and matter,
has neither end nor beginning, but the shape acquired by this triple unity
during its incarnations, their exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere
illusion of personal conceptions. This is why we call the posthumous life the
only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the personality itself, only
imaginary.
Why in this case should we call the reality sleep, and the phantasm waking?
This comparison was made by me to
facilitate your comprehension. From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions
it is perfectly accurate.
Note the words: “From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions”, for they are
the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an “illusion”. Our gross
physical matter is not there; the limitations imposed by it are not there; the
mind is in its own realm, where to will is to create, where to think is to see.
And so, when the Master was asked: “Would it not [56]
be better to say that death is nothing but a birth for a new life, or
still better, a going back to eternity?” he answered:
This is how it really is, and I have
nothing to say against such a way of putting it. Only with our accepted views of
material life the words “live” and “exist” are not applicable to the purely
subjective condition after death; and were they employed in our Philosophy
without a rigid definition of their meanings, the Vedantins would soon arrive at
the ideas which are common in our times among the American Spiritualists, who
preach about spirits marrying among themselves and with mortals. As amongst the
true, not nominal, Christians so amongst the Vedantins – the life on the other
side of the grave is the land where there are no tears, no sighs, where there is
neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and where the just realise their full
perfection.
The dread of materialising
mental and spiritual conceptions has always been very strong among the
Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far East. Their constant effort has been
to free the Thinker as far as possible from the bonds of matter even while he is
embodied, to open the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to
it for awhile, They are ever seeking “to spiritualise the material”, while in
the West the continual tendency has been
[57]
“to materialise the
spiritual”. So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all the terms
that make it least material – illusion, dream, and so on – whereas the Hebrew
endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive of the material luxury and
splendour of earth – marriage feast, streets of gold, thrones and crowns of
solid metal and precious stones; the Western has followed the materialising
conceptions of the Hebrew, and pictures a heaven which is merely a double of
earth with earth’s sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the
modern Summerland, with its “spirit-husbands”, “spiritwives”, and
“spirit-infants” that go to school and college, and grow up into spirit-adults.
In “Notes on Devachan”,*
[* The Path, May 1890.] someone who evidently writes
with knowledge remarks of the Devachanī:
The a priori ideas of space and time do not control his perceptions;
far he absolutely creates and annihilates them at the same time. Physical
existence has its cumulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its
diminishing energy from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived
correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachanī than she does the living
physical man. Nature provides for him far more real bliss and happiness
there than she does here, [58]
where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him. To call
the Devachan existence a “dream” in any other sense than that of a conventional
term, is to renounce for ever the knowledge of the Esoteric Doctrine, the sole
custodian of truth.
“Dream” only in the sense that it is not of this plane of gross matter, that it
belongs not to the physical world.
Let us try and take a general view of the life of the Eternal Pilgrim, the inner
Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he commences his new
pilgrimage – for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the past, during which he
gained the powers which enable him to tread the present one – he is a spiritual
Being, but one who has already passed out of the passive condition of pure
Spirit, and who by previous experience of matter in past ages has evolved
intellect, the self-conscious mind. But this evolution by experience is far from
being complete, even so far as to make him master of matter; his ignorance
leaves him a prey to all the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes into
contact with it, and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being subject
to the deceptive visions caused by gross matter – as a child, looking through a
piece of blue glass, imagines all the outside world to be blue.
[59] The
object of a cycle of incarnation is to free him from these illusions, so that
when he is surrounded by and working in gross matter he may retain clear vision
and not be blinded by illusion. Now the cycle of incarnation is made up of two
alternating states: a short one called life on earth, during which the
Pilgrim-God is plunged into gross matter, and a comparatively long one, called
life in Devachan, during which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still,
but far less illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called
his normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks in it
that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being less
removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased in matter, less
deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and gradually, by reiterated
experiences, gross matter loses its power over him and becomes his servant
instead of his tyrant. In the partial freedom of Devachan he assimilates his
experiences on earth, still partly dominated by them – at first, indeed, almost
completely dominated by them so that the devachanic life is merely a sublimated
continuation of the earth-life – but gradually freeing himself more and more as
he recognises them as transitory and external, until he can move through any
[60] region of
our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a true Lord of Mind, the free and
triumphant God. Such is the triumph of the Divine Nature manifested in the
flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to be the obedient instrument of
Spirit. Thus the Master said:
The spiritual Ego of the man moves in eternity like a pendulum between the
hours of life and death, but if these hours, the periods of life terrestrial and
life posthumous, are limited in their continuation, and even the very number of
such breaks in eternity between sleep and waking, between illusion and reality,
have their beginning as well as their end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is
eternal. Therefore the hours of his posthumous life, when unveiled he
stands face to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages of his terrestrial
existence are far from him, compose or make up, in our ideas, the
only reality. Such breaks, in spite of the fact that they are finite, do
double service to the Sūtrātmā, which, perfecting itself constantly, follows
without vacillation, though very slowly the road leading to its last
transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it becomes a Divine Being. They
not only contribute to the reaching of this goal, but without these finite
breaks Sūtrātmā-Buddhi could never reach it. Sūtrātmā is the actor, and its
numerous and different incarnations are the actor’s parts. I suppose you would
not apply to these parts, and so much the less to their costumes, the term of
personality. [61]
Like an actor the soul is bound to play; during the cycle of births up
to the very threshold of Parinirvana, many such parts, which often are
disagreeable to it, but like a bee, collecting its honey from every flower, and
leaving the rest to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality,
the Sūtrātmā, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities and consciousness
from every terrestrial personality in which it has to clothe itself, forced by
Karma, unites at last all these qualities in one, having then become a perfect
being, a Dhyān Chohan.* [* The Path,
May 1890.]
It is very significant, in
this connection, that every devachanic stage is conditioned by the earth-stage
that precedes it, and the Man can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of
experience he has been gathering on earth.
A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless, feeble devachanic
state.* [* “Notes on
Devachan”, as cited.]
Husband, father, student,
patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist – he must work out the effects of his
earth-life in his devachanic life; he cannot eat and assimilate more food than
he has gathered; he cannot reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but
a moment to cast a seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to
grow into the ripened ear; but
[62]
according to the
kind of the seed is the ear that grows from it, and according to the nature of
the brief earth-life is the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.
There is a change of occupation, a continual change in Devachan, just as much
and far more than there is in the life of any man or woman who happens to follow
in his or her whole life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this
difference, that to the Devachanī this spiritual occupation is always pleasant
and fills his life with rapture. Life in Devachan is the function of the
aspirations of earth-life; not the indefinite prolongation of that “single
instance”, but its infinite developments, the various incidents and events based
upon and outflowing from that one “single moment” or moments. The dreams of the
objective become the realities of the subjective existence . . . The reward
provided by Nature for men who are benevolent in a large systematic way, and who
have not focussed their affections on an individual or speciality, is that, if
pure, they pass the quicker for that through the Kāma and Rūpa Lokas into the
higher sphere of Tribhuvana, since it is one where the formulation of abstract
ideas and the consideration of general principles fill the thought of its
occupant.*
[* “Notes on Devachan”, as before. There are a variety of stages in
Devachan; the Rūpa Loka is an inferior stage, where the Soul is still surrounded
by forms. It has escaped from these personalities in the Tribhuvana.] [63]
Into Devachan enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter has been left
behind with all its attributes on earth and in Kāmaloka. But if the sower has
sowed but little seed, the devachanic harvest will be meagre, and the growth of
the Soul will be delayed by the paucity of the nutriment on which it has to
feed. Hence the enormous importance of the earth-life, the field of sowing,
the place where experience is to be gathered. It conditions, regulates,
limits, the growth of the Soul; it yields the rough ore which the Soul then
takes in hand, and works upon during the devachanic stage, smelting it, forging
it, tempering it, into the weapons it will take back with it for its next
earth-life. The experienced Soul in Devachan will make for itself a splendid
instrument for its next earth-life; the inexperienced one will forge a poor
blade enough; but in each case the only material available is that brought from
earth. In Devachan the Soul, as it were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it
lives a comparatively free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the
earthly experiences at their real value; it works out thoroughly and completely
as objective realities all the ideas of which it only conceived the germ on
earth. Thus, noble aspiration is a germ which the Soul would work out into a
splendid realisation in Devachan, and [64]
it would bring back with it to earth for its next incarnation that mental
image, to be materialised on earth when opportunity offers and suitable
environment presents itself. For the mind sphere is the sphere of creation, and
earth only the place for materialising the pre-existent thought. And the soul is
as an architect that works out his plans in silence and deep meditation, and
then brings them forth into the outer world where his edifice is to be builded;
out of the knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul draws his plans far the
next, and he returns to earth to put into objective material form the edifices
he has planned. This is the description of a Logos in creative activity:
Whilst Brahma formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was meditating on
creation, there appeared a creation beginning with ignorance and consisting of
darkness. … Brahmā, beholding that it was defective, designed another; and
whilst he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested. … Beholding this
creation also imperfect, Brahmā again meditated, and a third creation appeared,
abounding with the quality of goodness.*
[* Vishnu Purāna, Bk. I. ch. v.]
The objective
manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea, then form. Hence it
will be seen that the notion current among many Theosophists that Devachan is
waste time, is but one of the illusions due to the gross matter that blinds
them, and that their impatience of the idea of Devachan arises from the
[65]
delusion that
fussing about in gross matter is the only real activity. Whereas, in truth, all
effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out of the Silence comes
ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would be less feeble and
inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the profound root of meditation, and
if the Soul embodied passed oftener out of the body into Devachan during
earth-life, there would be less foolish action and consequent waste of time. For
Devachan is a state of consciousness, the consciousness of the Soul escaped for
awhile from the net of gross matter, and may be entered at any time by one who
has learned to withdraw his Soul from the senses as the tortoise withdraws
itself within its shell. And then, coming forth once more, action is prompt,
direct, purposeful, and the time “wasted” in meditation is more than saved by
the directness and strength of the mind-engendered act.
Devachan is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land of the Gods, or the
Souls. In the before quoted “Notes on Devachan” we read:
There are two fields of causal manifestations: the objective and the
subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome in the new personality of
each birth in the cycle of evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual
activities find their sphere of effects in Devachan.
[66]
As the moral and spiritual activities are the most important, and as on the
development of these depends the growth of the true Man, and therefore the
accomplishing of “the object of creation, the liberation of Soul”, we may begin
to understand something of the vast importance of the devachanic state.
THE DEVACHANĪ
When the Triad has shaken off its desire garment, it crosses the threshold of
Devachan, and becomes “a Devachanī”. We have seen that it is in a peaceful
dreamy state before this passage out of the earth-sphere, the “second death”, or
“pre-devachanic unconsciousness”. This condition is otherwise spoken of as the
“gestation” period, because it precedes the birth of the Ego into the devachanic
life. Regarded from the earth-sphere the passage is death, while regarded from
that of Devachan it is birth. Thus we find in “Notes on Devachan”:
As in actual earth-life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan the first
flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of
force passing into semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and – not
death but birth, birth into another personality, and the resumption of action
which daily begets new congeries of causes that must be worked out
[67] in
another term of Devachan, and still another physical birth as a new personality.
What the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in each instance
is determined by Karma, and this weary round of birth must be ever and ever run
through until the being reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the
interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and thus gets relieved
for a Round or two.
When the devachanic entity is born into this new sphere it has passed beyond
recall to earth. The embodied Soul may rise to it, but it cannot be drawn back
to our world. On this a Master has spoken decisively:
From Sukhāvatī down to the “Territory
of Doubt”, there is a variety of spiritual states, but … as soon as it has
stepped outside the Kāmaloka, crossed the “Golden Bridge” leading to the “Seven
Golden Mountains”, the Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums. No
Ernest or Joey has ever returned from the Rūpa Loka, let alone the Arūpa Loka,
to hold sweet intercourse with men.
In the “Notes on Devachan”, again, we read:
Certainly the new Ego, once that it is reborn (in Devachan), retains for a
certain time – proportionate to its earth-life – a complete recollection “of
his life on earth”; but it can never revisit the Earth from Devachan except in
Re-incarnation.[68]
The Devachanī is generally spoken of as the Immortal Triad, Ātma-Buddhi-Manas,
but it is well always to bear in mind that
Ātman is no individual property of any man, but is the Divine Essence which has
no body, no form, which is imponderable, invisible, and indivisible, that which
does not exist and yet is, as the Buddhists say of Nirvana. It only
overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and pervades the whole body
being only its omnipresent rays or light, radiated through Buddhi, its vehicle
and direct emanation.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 69. Third Edition.]
Buddhi and Manas united, with this overshadowing of Ātma, form the Devachanī;
now, as we have seen in studying the Seven Principles, Manas is dual during
earth-life, and the lower Manas is purified from all passional elements during
the kāmalokic interlude. By this purification of the Ray it carries only the
pure and noble experiences of the earth-life into Devachan with it, thus
maintaining the past personality as the marked characteristic of the Devachanī,
and it is in this prolongation of the “personal Ego”, so to speak, that the
“illusion” of the Devachanī consists. Were the manasic entity free from all
illusion, it would see all Egos as its brother-Souls, and looking back over its
past would recognise all the varied relationships it had borne to others in many
lives, as the actor would remember the many parts he had played with other
[69] actors,
and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts he had
played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his master, his friend.
The deeper human relationship would prevent the brother actors from identifying
each other with their parts, and so the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising
their deep unity and full brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the
trappings of earthly relationships. But the Devachanī, at least in the lower
stages, is still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life; he is
shut into the relationships of the one incarnation; his paradise is peopled with
those he “loved best with an undying love, that holy feeling that alone
survives”, and thus the purified personal Ego is the salient feature, as
above said, in the Devachanī. Again quoting from the “Notes on Devachan”:
“Who goes to Devachan?” The personal Ego, of course; but beatified, purified,
holy. Every Ego – the combination of the sixth and seventh principles
*
[* Sixth and seventh in the older nomenclature, fifth and sixth in the
later - i.e., Manas and Buddhi.]
– which after the period of unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan,
is of necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe. The fact of his being
reborn at all shows the preponderance of good over evil in his old personality.
And while the Karma [of Evil] steps [70]
aside for the time being to follow him in his future earth
re-incarnation, he brings along with him but the Karma of his good deeds, words
and thoughts into this Devachan. “Bad” is a relative term for us – as you were
told more than once before – and the Law of Retribution is the only law that
never errs. Hence all those who have not slipped down into the mire of
unredeemable sin and bestiality go to the Devachan. They will have to pay for
their sins, voluntary and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded;
receive the effects of the causes produced by them.
Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the ties they
form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in eternity. But let us look
at the question calmly for a moment. When a mother first clasps her baby-son in
her arms, that one relationship seems perfect, and if the child should die, her
longing would be to repossess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth
to manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the
clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends and
comrades, richer than ordinary friendship from the old recollections; yet later,
when the mother is aged and the son in the prime of middle life, their positions
are reversed and the son protects while the mother depends on him for guidance.
[71]
Would the relation have been more perfect had
it ceased in infancy with only the one tie, or is it not the richer and the
sweeter from the different strands of which the tie is woven? And so with Egos;
in many lives they may hold to each other many relationships, and finally,
standing as Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look back over past
lives and see themselves in earth-life related in the many ways possible to
human beings, till the cord is woven of every strand of love and duty; would not
the final unity be the richer not the poorer for the manystranded tie?
“Finally”, I say; but the word is only of this cycle, for what lies beyond, of
wider life and less separateness, no mind of man may know. To me it seems that
this very variety of experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that it
is a rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only one little
aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a thousand or so years
of one person in one character would, to me, be ample, and I should prefer to
know him or her in some new aspect of his nature. But those who object to this
view need not feel distressed, for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved
in the one personal aspect held by him or her in the one incarnation they are
conscious of for as long as the desire [72]
for that presence remains. Only let them not desire to impose
their own form of bliss on everybody else, nor insist that the kind of happiness
which seems to them at this stage the only one desirable and satisfying, must be
stereotyped to all eternity, through all the millions of years that lie before
us. Nature gives to each in Devachan the satisfaction of all pure desires, and
Manas there exercises that faculty of his innate divinity, that he “never wills
in vain”. Will not this suffice?
But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us “happiness” in a future
separated from our present by millions of years, so that we are no more fitted
now to formulate its conditions than is a child, playing with its dolls, to
formulate the deeper joys and interests of its maturity, let us understand that,
according to the teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachanī is
surrounded by all he loved on earth, with pure affection, and the union being on
the plane of the Ego, not on the physical plane, it is free from all the
sufferings which would be inevitable were the Devachanī present in consciousness
on the physical plane with all its illusory and transitory joys and sorrows. It
is surrounded by its beloved in the higher consciousness, but is not agonised by
the knowledge of what they are suffering in the lower consciousness, held in the
bonds [73] of
the flesh. According to the orthodox Christian view, Death is a separation, and
the “spirits of the dead” wait for reunion until those they love also pass
through Death’s gateway, or – according to some – until after the judgment-day
is over. As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death cannot touch
the higher consciousness of man, and that it can only separate those who love
each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on
earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards,
but the Devachanī, says H. P. Blavatsky, has a complete conviction “that there
is no such thing as Death at all”, having left behind it all those vehicles
“over which Death has power”. Therefore, to its less blinded eyes, its beloved
are still with it; for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn away.
A mother dies, leaving behind her little helpless children, whom she adores,
perhaps a beloved husband also. We say that her “Spirit” or Ego – that
individuality which is now wholly impregnated, for the entire devachanic period,
with the noblest feelings held by its late personality, i.e., love
for her children, pity for those who suffer, and so on – is now entirely
separated from the “vale of tears”, that its future bliss consists in that
blessed ignorance of all the woes it left behind … that the post-mortem
spiritual consciousness of the mother will represent to her that she lives
surrounded by her children and all those whom she loved; that no gap, no link
will be missing to make her disembodied state the most perfect and absolute
happiness.* [*
Key to Theosophy, p. 99. Third Edition.]
[74]
And so again:
As to the ordinary mortal his bliss in Devachan is complete. It is an absolute
oblivion of all that gave it pain or sorrow in the past incarnation, and even
oblivion of the fact that such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The
Devachanī lives its intermediate cycle between two incarnations surrounded by
everything it had aspired to in vain, and in the companionship of everything it
loved on earth. It has reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And
thus it lives throughout long centuries an existence of unalloyed
happiness, which is the reward for its sufferings in earth-life. In short, it
bathes in a sea of uninterrupted felicity spanned only by events of still
greater felicity in degree.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 100.]
When we take the wider sweep in thought demanded by the Esoteric Philosophy, a
far more fascinating prospect of persistent love and union between individual
Egos rolls itself out before our eyes than was offered to us by the more limited
creed of exoteric Christendom. “Mothers love their children with an immortal
love”, says H. P. Blavatsky, and the reason for this immortality in love is
easily grasped when we realise that it is the same Egos that play so many parts
in the drama of life, that the experience of each part is recorded in the memory
of the Soul, and that between the Souls there is no separation, though during
incarnation they may not realise the fact in its fulness and beauty.
We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and far, far nearer to
them now than when they were alive. And it is [75]
not only in the fancy of the Devachanī, as some may imagine, but in
reality. For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of a human heart, but
has its roots in eternity. Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings
sooner or later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual affection
to incarnate once more in the same family group.* [*
Key to Theosophy, p. 101. 1969 Ed., p. 95.]
Love “has its roots in
eternity”, and those to whom on earth we are strongly drawn are the Egos we have
loved in past earth-lives and dwelt with in Devachan; coming back to earth,
these enduring bonds of love draw us together yet again, and add to the strength
and beauty of the tie, and so on and on till all illusions are lived down, and
the strong and perfected Egos stand side by side, sharing the experience of
their well-nigh illimitable past.
THE RETURN TO EARTH
At length the causes that carried the Ego into Devachan are exhausted, the
experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, and the Soul begins to feel
again the thirst for sentient material life that can be gratified only on the
physical plane. The greater the degree of spirituality reached, the purer and
loftier the preceding earth-life, the longer the stay in Devachan,
[76] the world
of spiritual, pure, and lofty effects. [I am
here ignoring the special conditions surrounding one who is forcing his own
evolution, and has entered on the Path that leads to Adeptship within a very
limited number of lives.] The “average time
[in Devachan] is
from ten to fifteen centuries”, H. P. Blavatsky tells us, and the fifteen
centuries cycle is one of those most plainly marked in history.*
[*See Manual No. 2, Reincarnation, pp. 60, 61. Third Edition.]
But in modern life this period has much shortened, in consequence of
the greater attraction exercised by physical objects over the heart of man.
Further, it must be remembered that the “average time” is not the time spent in
Devachan by any person. If one person spends there 1000 years, and another
fifty, the “average” is 525. The devachanic period is longer or shorter
according to the type of life which preceded it; the more there was of
spiritual, intellectual, and emotional activity of a lofty kind, the longer will
be the gathering in of the harvest; the more there was of activity directed to
selfish gain on earth, the shorter will be the devachanic period.
When the experiences are assimilated, be the time long or short, the Ego is
ready to return, and he brings back with him his now increased experience, and
any [77]
further gains he may have made in Devachan along the lines of abstract thought;
for, while in Devachan,
In one sense we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can develop further any
faculty which we loved and strove after during life, provided it is concerned
with abstract and ideal things, such as music, painting, poetry, etc.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 105. Third Edition. 1969 Ed., pp. 100-1.]
But the Ego meets, as he crosses the threshold of Devachan on his way outwards –
dying out of Devachan to be reborn on earth – he meets in the “atmosphere of the
terrestrial plane”, the seeds of evil sown in his preceding life on earth.
During the devachanic rest he has been free from all pain, all sorrow, but the
evil he did in his past has been in a state of suspended animation, not of
death. As seeds sown in the autumn for the springtime lie dormant beneath the
surface of the soil, but touched by the soft rain and penetrating warmth of sun
begin to swell and the embryo expands and grows, so do the seeds of evil we have
sown lie dormant while the Soul takes its rest in Devachan, but shoot out their
roots into the new personality which begins to form itself for the incarnation
of the returning man. The Ego has to take up the burden of his past, and these
germs or seeds, coming over as the harvest of the past life, are the Skandhas,
to borrow a [78]
convenient word from our Buddhist brethren. They consist of material
qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, mental powers, and
while the pure aroma of these attached itself to the Ego and passed with it into
Devachan, all that was gross, base and evil remained in the state of suspended
animation spoken of above. These are taken up by the Ego as he passes outwards
towards terrestrial life, and are built into the new “man of flesh” which the
true man is to inhabit. And so the round of births and deaths goes on, the
turning of the Wheel of Life; the treading of the Cycle of Necessity, until the
work is done and the building of the Perfect Man is completed.
NIRVANA
What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvana is to the finished cycle of
Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious state would here
be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off the “After” of Death, for no
word of man, strictly limited within the narrow bounds of his lower
consciousness, may avail to explain what Nirvana is, can do aught save disfigure
it in striving to describe. What it is not may be roughly, badly stated – it is
not “annihilation”, it is not [79]
destruction of consciousness. Mr. A. P. Sinnett has put effectively and
briefly the absurdity of many of the ideas current in the West about Nirvāna.
He has been speaking of absolute consciousness, and proceeds:
We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no ordinary mind –
dominated by its physical brain and brain-born intellect – can they have a
living signification. All that words can convey is that Nirvāna is a sublime
state of conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after all that
has gone before, to turn to the various discussions which have been carried on
by students of exoteric Buddhism as to whether Nirvāna does or does not mean
annihilation. Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with which
the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a question. Does the last penalty
of the law mean the highest honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem
of the most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as these but
faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question whether Nirvāna is held by
Buddhism to be equivalent to annihilation.*
[* Esoteric Buddhism, p. 197. Eighth Edition.]
So we learn from The Secret Doctrine that the Nirvānī returns to
cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that
The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves only in Nirvāna,
reemerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law calls all
things back into action.* [* Quoted in The
Secret Doctrine, vol. ii. p. 83. The student will do well to read, for a
fair presentation of the subject, G. R. S. Mead’s “Note on Nirvāna” in
‘Lucifer’, for March, April, and May 1893. (Reprinted in Theosophical
Siftings.)] [80]
COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN
THE EARTH AND OTHER SPHERES
We are now in position to discriminate between the various kinds of
communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide into “dead” and
“living”, as though the body were the man, or the man could die. “Communications
between the embodied and the disembodied” would be a more satisfactory phrase.
First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit does not
communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest principle is
not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden fount of all, the eternal
Energy, one of the poles of Being in manifestation. The word is loosely used to
denote lofty Intelligences, who live and move beyond all conditions of matter
imaginable by us, but pure Spirit is at present as inconceivable by us as pure
matter. And as in dealing with possible “communications” we have average human
beings as recipients, we may as well exclude the word Spirit as much as
possible, and so get rid of ambiguity. But in quotations the word often occurs,
in deference to the habit of the day, and it then denotes the Ego.
[81]
Taking the stages through
which the living man passes after “Death”, or the shaking off of the body, we
can readily classify the communications that may be received, or the appearances
that may be seen:
I. While the Soul has
shaken off only the dense body, and remains still clothed in the etheric
double. This is a brief period only, but during it the disembodied Soul may
show itself, clad in this ethereal garment.
For a very short period after death, while the incorporeal principles remain
within the sphere of our earth’s attraction, it is possible for spirit,
under peculiar and favourable conditions, to appear.*
[* Theosophist, Sept. 1882, p. 310.]
It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor while dwelling in
this form. Such “ghosts” are silent, dreamy, like sleep-walkers, and indeed they
are nothing more than astral sleep-walkers. Equally irresponsive, but capable of
expressing a single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident, murder, etc., are
apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying,
taking shape in the astral world, and carried by the dying person’s will to some
particular person, with whom the dying intensely longs to communicate. Such a
thought, sometimes called a Māyāvi Rūpa, or illusory form,
[82]
may be often thrown
into objectivity, as in the case of apparitions after death; but, unless it is
projected with the knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or owing to the
intensity of the desire to see
or appear to some one shooting through, the dying brain, the apparition will be
simply automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic attraction, or to any
act of volition, any more than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously
near a mirror is due to the desire of the latter.
When the Soul has left the etheric double, shaking it off as it shook off the
dense body, the double thus left as a mere empty corpse may be galvanised into
an “artificial life”; but fortunately the method of such galvanisation is known
to few.
II. While the Soul is in Kāmaloka. This period is of very variable duration.
The Soul is clad in an astral body, the last but one of its perishable garments,
and while thus clad it can utilise the physical bodies of a medium, thus
consciously procuring for itself an instrument whereby it can act on the world
it has left, and communicate with those living in the body. In this way it may
give information as to facts known to itself only, or to itself and another
person, in the earth-life just closed; and for as long as it remains within the
terrestrial atmosphere such communication is possible.
[83] The harm and the peril of such
communication has been previously explained, whether the lower Manas be united
with the Divine Triad and so on its way to Devachan, or wrenched from it and on
its way to destruction.
III. While the Soul is in Devachan, if an embodied Soul is capable of rising to
its sphere, or of coming into rapport with it. To the Devachanī, as we
have seen, the beloved are present in consciousness and full communication, the
Egos being in touch with each other, though one is embodied and one is
disembodied, but the higher consciousness of the embodied rarely affects the
brain. As a matter of fact, all that we know on the physical plane of our
friend, while we both are embodied, is the mental image caused by the impression
he makes on us. This is, to our consciousness, our friend, and lacks nothing in
objectivity. A similar image is present to the consciousness of the Devachanī,
and to him lacks nothing in objectivity. As the physical plane friend is visible
to an observer on earth, so is the mental plane friend visible to an observer on
that plane. The amount of the friend that ensouls the image is dependent on his
own evolution, a highly evolved person being capable of far more communication
with a Devachanī than one who is unevolved. [84]
Communication when the body is sleeping is easier than when it is awake,
and many a vivid “dream” of one on the other side of death is a real interview
with him in Kāmaloka or in Devachan.
Love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it,*
[* See on “illusion” what was said under the heading “Devachan”.]
has a magic and divine potency that reacts on the living. A mother’s Ego,
filled with love for the imaginary children it sees near itself, living a life
of happiness, as real to it as when on earth – that love will always be felt by
the children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams and often in various
events – in providential protections and escapes, for love is a strong
shield and is not limited by space or time. As with this devachanic “mother”, so
with the rest of human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish or
material.*
[*Key to Theosophy, p. 102. Third Edition.]
Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable of working good or
evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send to those they love helping
and protecting forces, so the Devachanī, thinking of those dear to him, may send
out such helpful and protective thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels
round his beloved on earth. But this is a very different thing from the “Spirit”
of the mother coming back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator of the
child’s woes. [85]
The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of flesh, and come into
relations with the Devachanī. H. P. Blavatsky writes:
Whenever years after the death of a person his spirit is claimed to have
“wandered back to earth” to give advice to those it loved, it is always in a
subjective vision, in dream or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the
living seer that is drawn to the disembodied spirit, and not the latter
which wanders back to our spheres.*
[* Theosophist, Sept. 1881.]
Where the sensitive, or
medium, is of a pure and lofty nature, this rising of the freed Ego to the
Devachanī is practicable, and naturally gives the impression to the sensitive
that the departed Ego has come back to him. The Devachanī is wrapped in its
happy “illusion”, and
the Souls or astral Egos, of pure loving sensitives, labouring under the same
delusion, think their loved ones come down to there on earth, while it is their
own spirits that are raised towards those in the Devachan.*
[* “Notes on Devachan”, Path, June 1890, p. 80.]
This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from Kāmaloka or from
Devachan:
A “spirit”, or the spiritual Ego, cannot descend to the medium, but it
can attract the spirit of the latter to itself, and it can do this only
during the two intervals – before and after its “gestation period”. Interval the
first is that period between the physical death and the merging of the spiritual
Ego into that state which is known in the Arhat Esoteric Doctrine as “Bar-do”.
We have [86]
translated this as the “gestation period”, and it lasts from a few days to
several years, according to the evidence of the Adepts. Interval the second
lasts so long as the merits of the old [personal] Ego entitle the being to reap
the fruit of its reward in its new regenerated Ego-ship. It occurs after the
gestation period is over, and the new spiritual Ego is reborn-like the fabled
Phoenix from its ashes – from the old one. The locality which the former
inhabits is called by the northern Buddhist Occultists “Devachan”.*
[*Theosophist, June 1882, p. 226.]
So also may the incorporeal principles of pure sensitives be placed en
rapport with disembodied Souls, although information thus obtained is not
reliable, partly in consequence of the difficulty of transferring to the
physical brain the impressions received, and partly from the difficulty of
observing accurately, when the seer is untrained.*
[* Summarized from article in Theosophist, Sept. 1882.]
A pure medium’s Ego can be drawn to and made, for an instant, to unite in a
magnetic (?) relation with a real disembodied spirit, whereas the soul of an
impure medium can only confabulate with the Astral Soul, or Shell, of the
deceased. The former possibility explains those extremely rare cases of direct
writing in recognised autographs, and of messages from the higher class of
disembodied intelligences.
But the confusion in
messages thus obtained is considerable, not only from the causes above named,
but also because
even the best and purest sensitive can at most only be placed at any time en
rapport with a particular spiritual entity, and can only know, see, and feel
what that particular entity knows, sees, and feels.
[87]
Hence much possibility of error if generalisations are indulged in, since each
Devachanī lives in his own paradise, and there is no “peeping down to earth”.
Nor is there any conscious communication with the flying Souls that come
as it were to learn where the Spirits are, what they are doing, and what they
think, feel, and see.
What then is being en rapport? It is simply an identity of molecular
vibration between the astral part of the incarnated sensitive and the astral
part of the dis-incarnated personality. The spirit of the sensitive gets “odylised”,
so to speak, by the aura of the spirit, whether this be hybernating in the
earthly region or dreaming in the Devachan; identity of molecular vibration is
established, and for a brief space the sensitive becomes the departed
personality, and writes in its handwriting, uses its language, and thinks its
thoughts. At such times sensitives may believe that those with whom they are
for the moment en rapport descend to earth and communicate with them,
whereas, in reality, it is merely their own spirits which, being correctly
attuned to those others, are for the time blended with them.*
[*’Theosophist’, Sept. 1882, p. 309.]
In a special case under
examination, H. P. Blavatsky said that the communication might have come from an
Elementary, but that it was
far more likely that the medium’s spirit really became en rapport with
some spiritual entity in Devachan, the thoughts, knowledge, and sentiments of
which formed the substance, while the medium’s own personality and pre-existing
ideas more or less governed the forms of the communication.*
[* Ibid., p. 310.]
While these communications are not reliable in the facts and opinions stated,
we would remark that it may possibly be that there really is a distinct
spiritual entity impressing our correspondent’s mind. In
[88]
other words, there may, for all we know, be some
spirit, with whom his spiritual nature becomes habitually, for the time,
thoroughly harmonised, and whose thoughts, language, etc., become his for the
time, the result being that this spirit seems to communicate with him. … It is
possible (though by no means probable) that he habitually passes into a state of
rapport with a genuine spirit, and, for the time, is assimilated
therewith, thinking (to a great extent if not entirely) the thoughts that spirit
would think, writing in its handwriting, etc. But even so, Mr. Terry must not
fancy that that spirit is consciously communicating with him, or knows in any
way anything of him, or any other person or thing on earth. It is simply that,
the rapport established, he, Mr. Terry, becomes for the nonce assimilated
with that other personality, and thinks, speaks, and writes as it would have
done on earth. … The molecules of his astral nature may from time to time
vibrate in perfect unison with those of some spirit of such a person, now in
Devachan, and the result may be that he appears to be in communication with that
spirit, and to be advised, etc., by him, and clairvoyants may see in the Astral
Light a picture of the earth-life form of that spirit.
IV. Communications other than those from disembodied Souls, passing through
normal post-mortem states.
(a) From Shells. These, while but the cast-off garment of the liberated
Soul, retain for some time the impress of their late inhabitant, and reproduce
automatically his habits of thought and expression, just as a physical body will
automatically repeat habitual gestures. Reflex action is as possible to the
desire body as to the physical, but all reflex action is marked by its character
of repetition, and absence of all power to initiate movement. It answers to a
stimulus with [89]
an appearance of purposive action, but it initiates nothing. When people
“sit for development”, or when at a seance they anxiously hope and wait
for messages from departed friends, they supply just the stimulus needed, and
obtain the signs of recognition for which they expectantly watch.
(b) From Elementaries. These, possessing the lower capacities of the
mind, i.e., all the intellectual faculties that found their expression
through the physical brain during life, may produce communications of a highly
intellectual character. These, however, are rare, as may be seen from a survey
of the messages published as received from “departed Spirits”.
(c) From Elementals, or Nature Spirits. These play a great part at
seances, and are mostly the agents who are active in producing physical
phenomena. They throw about or carry objects, make noises, ring bells, etc.,
etc. Sometimes they play pranks with Shells, animating them and representing
them to be the spirits of great personalities who have lived on earth, but who
have sadly degenerated in the “spirit-world”, judging by their effusions.
Sometimes, in materialising seances, they busy themselves in throwing
pictures from the Astral Light on the fluidic forms produced, so causing them to
assume likenesses of various persons. There [90]
are also Elementals of a high type who occasionally communicate with very
gifted mediums, “Shining Ones” from other spheres.
(d) From Nirmānakāyas. For these communications, as for the two classes
next mentioned, the medium must be of a very pure and lofty nature. The
Nirmānakāya is a perfected man, who has cast aside his physical body but retains
his other lower principles, and remains in the earth-sphere for the sake of
helping forward the evolution of mankind. Nirmānakāyas
have, out of pity for mankind and those they left on earth, renounced the
Nirvanic state. Such an Adept, or Saint, or whatever you may call him, believing
it a selfish act to rest in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of
misery produced by ignorance, renounces Nirvana and determines to remain
invisible in spirit on this earth. They have no material body, as they
have left it behind: but otherwise they remain with all their principles even
in astral life in our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few
elect ones, only surely not with ordinary mediums.*
[* Key to Theosophy, p. 151.]
(e) From Adepts now living on earth. These often communicate with Their
disciples, without using the ordinary methods of communication, and when any tie
exists, perchance from some past incarnation, between an Adept and a medium,
constituting that medium a disciple, a message from the Adept might readily be
mistaken for a message from a “Spirit”. [91]
The receipt of such messages by precipitated writing or spoken words is
within the knowledge of some.
(f) From the medium’s Higher Ego. Where a pure and earnest man or woman
is striving after the light, this upward striving is met by a downward reaching
of the higher nature, and light from the higher streams downward, illuminating
the lower consciousness. Then the lower mind is, for the time, united with its
parent, and transmits as much of its knowledge as it is able to retain.
From this brief sketch it will be seen how varied may be the sources from which
communications apparently from “the other side of Death” may be received. As
said by H. P. Blavatsky:
The variety of the causes of phenomena is great, and one need be an Adept, and
actually look into and examine what transpires, in order to be able to explain
in each case what really underlies it.* [*
Theosophist, Sept. 1882, p. 310.]
To complete the statement it may be added that what the average Soul can do when
it has passed through the gateway of Death, it can do on this side, and
communications may be as readily obtained by writing, in trance, and by the
other means of receiving messages, from embodied as from disembodied Souls.
[92] If each
developed within himself the powers of his own Soul, instead of drifting about
aimlessly, or ignorantly plunging into dangerous experiments, knowledge might be
safely accumulated and the evolution of the Soul might be accelerated. This one
thing is sure: Man is today a living Soul, over whom Death has no power, and the
key of the prison-house of the body is in his own hands, so that he may learn
its use if he will. It is because his true Self, while blinded by the body, has
lost touch with other Selves, that Death has been a gulf instead of a gateway
between embodied and disembodied Souls. [93]
[94 - blank]
APPENDIX
The following passage on the fate of suicides is taken from the Theosophist,
September 1882.
We do not pretend – we are not permitted – to deal exhaustively with the
question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important classes of
entities, who can participate in objective phenomena, other than Elementaries
and Elementals.
This class comprises the Spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are Spirits,
and not Shells, because there is not in their cases, at any rate until
later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth and fifth principles on
the one hand, and the sixth and seventh on the other. The two duads are divided,
they exist apart, but a line of connection still unites them, they may yet
reunite, and the sorely threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth
principle still holds in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth
of earthly sins and passions, it may regain the sacred penetralia.
[95] But for
the time, though really a Spirit, and therefore so designated, it is practically
not far removed from a Shell.
This class of Spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but, as a rule, its
members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege, while it is scarcely
possible for them to do otherwise than lower and debase the moral nature of
those with and through whom they have much communication. It is merely, broadly
speaking, a question of degree; of much or little injury resulting from such
communication; the cases in which real, permanent good can arise are too
absolutely exceptional to require consideration.
Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against the trials
of life-trials, the results of its own former actions; trials, heaven’s merciful
medicine for the mentally and spiritually diseased – determines, instead of
manfully taking arms against a sea of troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as
it fancies, end them. It destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much
alive mentally as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an
intricate web of prior causes, which its own willful sudden act cannot shorten.
That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower half of the
hand [96]
hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from the upper bell is
dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it issues; but that stream will run
on, unnoticed though it remain, until the whole store in that upper receptacle
is exhausted.
So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient existence,
foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of causes) to intervene before
the dissolution of the personality; this must run on for its appointed period.
This is so in other cases, e.g., those of the victims of accident or
violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these, too, we may
speak on another occasion – but here it is sufficient to notice that, whether
good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of death alters wholly their
subsequent position. They, too, have to wait on within the “Region of Desires”
until their wave of life runs on to and reaches its appointed shore, but they
wait on, wrapped in dreams soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to
their mental and moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt
from further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except just
at the moment of real death) of communicating scio motu with mankind,
though not wholly beyond the possible reach of [97]
the higher forms of the “Accursed Science”, Necromancy. The question is a
profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain, within the brief
space still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately after death differ
so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man who deliberately lays down
(not merely risks) his life from altruistic motives in the hope of
saving those of others; and (2) of him who deliberately sacrifices his life from
selfish motives, in the hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before
him. Nature or Providence, Fate, or God, being merely a self-adjusting machine,
it would at first sight seem as if the result must be identical in both cases.
But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a machine sui generis
—
Out of himself he span
The eternal web of right and wrong;
And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
The slenderest thread along.
A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the highest
human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica, in petto.
And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at times
marvelously potent material, forces, an we may then begin to comprehend why the
[98] hero,
sacrificing his life on pure altruistic grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs
way into a sweet dream, wherein
All that he wishes and all that he loves
Come smiling round his sunny way,
only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the Region of
Happiness, while the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who, seeking to elude
fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks the golden bowl, finds
himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with all the evil cravings and
desires that embittered his world-life, without a body in which to gratify
these, and capable of only such partial alleviation as is possible by more or
less vicarious gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete
rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate
annihilation after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering.
Let it not be supposed
that there is no hope for this class – the sane deliberate suicide. If, bearing
steadfastly his cross, he suffers patiently his punishment, striving against
carnal appetites still alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course,
each in proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life –
if, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted here or
there into unlawful
[99]
gratifications of
unholy desires – then when his fated death-hour strikes, his four higher
principles reunite, and, in the final separation that then ensues, it may well
be that all may be well with him, and that he passes on to the gestation period
and its subsequent developments.
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